When comparing Bitbucket vs SourceForge, the Slant community recommends Bitbucket for most people. In the question“What are the best alternatives to GitHub for Open Source projects?”Bitbucket is ranked 3rd while SourceForge is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Bitbucket is:

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories for free, as long as the number of members in a team is not larger than 5. In other words, it does not charge for each number of private repository, instead it charges by the number of team members.

Pros

Pro

Free unlimited private repositories for small teams

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories for free, as long as the number of members in a team is not larger than 5. In other words, it does not charge for each number of private repository, instead it charges by the number of team members.

Pro

Native application for both Mac and Windows

Atlassian, the company behind BitBucket is also behind SourceTree, a free application for Windows and Mac wich works as a client for both Git and Mercurial and can be connected to BitBucket and/or other code hosting services.

Pro

Multiple authentication methods

Pro

JIRA integration

JIRA, the widely used project and issue tracker is developed by Atlassian, the same team that's behind BitBucket.

When the two are integrated, JIRA automatically updates issues when a new commit is made in the BitBucket repo.

Pro

Allows importing existing repositories

BitBucket has a feature which allows users to import an existing repository that has been hosted elsewhere.

The process is very simple, either a service is selected from a dropdown menu and then a repo can be chosen and the URL for a repository can be added in the specified field. Once that's done, the repository is now uploade into BitBucket and can be edited, forked and compared to other repos hosted there.

Pro

Supports hosting static websites

Pro

Atlassian offers student licenses for both students and educators for Atlassian products that will be used in a classroom setting for education. This includes BitBucket, which means that students and teachers can have unlimited private repositories with and unlimited number of contributors.

Pro

Backed by a trustable company that has proved it's worth

BitBucket is developed and maintained by Atlassian, which is not an unknown venture, especially for developers. Atlassian has a great number of other products used by million of users worldwide, including JIRA, HipChat, Confluence and Stash.

Pro

Mercurial support

Pro

Easy Trello integration

You can link BitBucket with your Trello board easily.

Pro

SourceForge offers a lot of helpful features for open source projects

Every project hosted on SourceForge can have discussion boards, and issue tracker, a tab for screenshots and something most code hosts don't have: a Shell access. Developers can also websites for their projects for free on SourceForge, as well as a Wiki for documentation.The downside to this is that there is a lot of clutter in the beginning, and it may take a long time for beginners to check what they need and what they don't and where everything is.

Pro

Easy for downloading projects

SourceForge makes it easy for users to download software hosted on it. It detects the user's platform and provides them with an appropriate version. They also have an extensive mirror network all over the world, which helps speed up downloads.

For developers, they offer download stats which are grouped by platform and by region.

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Cons

Con

Private repositories are free for only 5 users

Private repositories are free for teams with 5 members or less. If a team is larger, then BitBucket charges for each additional team member.

Con

Proprietary

Con

Not as stable as github

Users have experienced several half a day downtimes, almost every month. True, github is down once in a while, but when GitHub is down complaints breaks loose on Twitter, TechCrunch, and other major media outlets. For the past 5 years github has been down only three times, and two of these times they were attacked by major adversaries.

Con

Requires registration of a "universal atlassian account"

Not a big con for some, but annoying to others.

Con

Cluttered UI

Compared to other hosts, Sourceforge's UI feels messy and cluttered. Ads take up large portions of screen real estate, and feature creep has resulted in buttons and links everywhere that can sometimes make it difficult to find what you're looking for.

Con

Downloads from SourceForge come with a closed-source installer which attempts to install third-party software

One of the main points of open source software is that users are getting a trustworthy product which they can trust, SourceForge has violated this trust in the past. Every project that is downloaded from SourceForge comes with it's (closed-source) installer which attempts to install third-party software in the computer. These third-party software, more often than not are adware or malware.

Dice, the new owners of SourceForge have chosen this as a way of monetisation and they strongly encourage developers to participate in this by giving them a cut of the profits.

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